Dear Midnight:

You are welcome and thank you for being here. Hope you post again-
anita

Dear Midnight:

I re-read through your thread to refresh my memory.

I also read since you started your thread, I read replies you posted on other people’s threads. I was very impressed with your intellect, your approach: you are a very intelligent, reasonable, wider- perspective person.

Back to your thread: did you talk to your therapist about having been bullied by your brother, since you wrote on this thread that you will bring it up with him?

It seems to me that the origin of your ROCD type anxiety is in your early relationships- the one with your brother and those with your parents. There is some compromise you made at a very early age, I am thinking, a compromise with reality. Something hurt to much to keep in awareness so you closed your eyes to it best you can, removed it from your awareness so to minimize your distress (an automatic process).

And so, as intelligent, reasonable and wider- perspective as you are, you cannot integrate some crucial information so to heal, because it involves feeling that distress that was once too much to bear.

If you’d like, share next about your relationship with your mother (you mentioned having had issues with her). Just write whatever comes to your mind about her and your relationship with her through the years. If you run out of things to write, write about your father and your relationship with him.

anita

Dear Midnight:

No, I didn’t at all mean that you were “compromising, that I was closing my eyes to the reality in which I am living – meaning, that my relationship cannot be truly satisfying.” I meant that as a child you compromised with reality, as children do.

I want to send this tid bit before I read the rest of your last post and reply. Once again: there is no evidence I detected that your husband is not good enough to be your husband and that your relationship with him is lacking other than your ROCD symptoms which predate your relationship with him and have nothing to do with him.

anita

Dear Midnight:

I am thinking, from my experience with incompetent and one competent therapist that yours is not competent enough, not good enough, too vague, too not directive and well, so different than my own one good experience with a therapist. Mine started with a free session, followed a few he gave me a typed diagnosis as a starting point of therapy, with a list of objectives he intended to meet in our therapy and how to get there. I still have those papers. After a few months he revisited those and re-evaluated.

His sessions with me often went longer than any set time. I don’t remember there being a set time except when he had a session with another client right after.

He gave me homework from one session to the next, checked homework next. Part of the therapy was psycho-education. There was nothing mysterious, no vague suggestions; everything was clear. He gave me all he had, all the information, all his understanding. When my two years with him were over, I had the education and the tools to continue on my own.

He was honest, hard working and committed to my well being with no motivation or intent to prolong the process so he can guarantee his income from me.

Another point: I believe there are probably no earth shattering sexual abuse in your childhood- often this is what people try to find- the forgotten, repressed sexual abuse. What happens is that sexual experiences later in life are of the affected by injuries in childhood, but those injuries are most often not sexual.

Also, there may very well be no physical abuse or an earth shattering, movie-worthy revelation. The injuries in childhood, looking back as adults, don’t look “that bad”- but for a child, they were that bad! A child sees things from a very fresh perspective, a “beginner’s mind”, a perspective o a child whose brain is just beginning to be formed. What you see from here, as an adult, is not what you saw then.

You wrote: ” I have always had this feeling of dread, stress and distance from my partner in any long relationship”- what you think now that you need to uproot, hidden memories or feelings you felt as a child, those feelings never left you. You are still feeling “dread, stress and distance from..” This is what you felt then, as a child, and still feeling. As a matter of fact, you wrote “I have always”- and I agree, always as from a very early age.

So it is the dread, stress and distance that you experienced as a child, in your relationship with every care taker: both your parents, and your older brother, that I believe is the root for your ROCD.

anita

Dear Midnight:

Bed time for me but will reply to you tomorrow morning. I did read your first few lines thought (will read the rest tomorrow). You wrote “it’s still hard for me to believe that these issues stem from my childhood experiences.”

We are formed during our childhood, as a result of our childhood experiences. Those childhood years are called our Formative Years because our brains are formed then, connections made. Your first relationships were the ones in your childhood, with your care takers and the people you spent a lot of time with.

Till the-morrow, take care:

anita

Dear Midnight:

The effectiveness of your current therapy depends on your goal. If your goal continues to be what you mentioned that it is: a place to vent your feelings about your husband (ROCD) so that you can manage to stay with your husband and maintain a reasonable relationship- then your therapy has been effective so far.

If your goal is to heal from your ROCD, then your therapy is ineffective. An effective therapy for healing is not a wing-it kind of therapy, a place where you go to vent. A professional therapist, as I see it, is like the one I had. He was flexible enough to attend to what I brought up to each session but he also prepared from one session to the next. He set goals to my therapy, a strategy regarding meeting those goals; he responded to me via email and phone in between sessions (no extra charge!). He often emailed me a homework assignment via email after a session. He thought about me, as his patient/ client in between sessions. This is very unlike my other experiences with therapists who seemed to think about me only for the fifty minutes I was there, at best.

Did I mention to you that I too had ROCD? I no longer do following my therapy which I shared with you here.

Regarding the connection between your childhood experiences and ROCD and how to access childhood memories, this is what I learned from experience (and I mentioned this principle to you already):

You currently, in the present time, are feeling what you felt as a child. So you don’t need to go back but instead, notice what you are feeling now, “this feeling of dread, stress and distance”- that you are currently feeling IS the feeling you had as a child. So there is the access. Here is another thing you have access to in the present: your present relationships with your parents and older brother.

The goal of the ROCD is to focus on what is less distressing for you to focus on (your relationship with your husband, and before him, other boyfriends) instead of what is more distressing (your relationships with your parents and older brother).

Again: it is up to you what your goal is, if it is to maintain your relationship with your husband as is; manage the ROCD via venting so it doesn’t destroy your relationship with your husband, then your therapy is so far adequate. Unfortunately, you are likely to continue to be distressed throughout your relationship and otherwise.

If your goal is healing, so that you are no longer distressed- then your therapy has been inadequate.

anita

Dear Midnight:

I saw my therapist when I lived in Southern California. If you do too, let me know. He cannot legally treat a person who lives in another state (as I do for the past three years), via skype or such.

Regarding your concern about terminating your relationship with your therapist as being congruent with ROCD behavior: your therapist is not- or shouldn’t be- your friend or boyfriend-like in any way. He is supposed to be a professional, much like a medical doctor would be. He is paid for a purpose- to promote your healing. He has this professional obligation to you- to help you heal (or manage, as long as the goal is clear to both of you).

It is not your job to understand him, to reach out to him, to be liked by him, to figure his limitations and be understanding. It is his job to help you heal/ manage. This is why he is paid.

So, no- terminating your supposed professional relationship with him because he has not fulfilled his professional obligation to you does not fall within your ROCD.

My therapist’s initial diagnosis of me was not ROCD. I let him know from the beginning that I was already diagnosed with OCD. The diagnosis he started with was Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)- and I no longer fit the criteria for that diagnosis. Anxiety- yes, still healing, in the process.

Regarding your thoughts: ” maybe I’m just ‘like that’. Maybe this is my character, my physiology even, and there’s nothing to be done.” This is what I thought too, for the longest time. Not completely: I was conflicted regarding Nature vs Nurture. After my therapy and my healing process of more than five years, ongoing, Nurture wins. As I communicate with other people online and in person, again and again, I see Nurture being most influential.

Nature is the case in animals that act strictly by instincts, like bees. Nurture plays more in animals that have emotions, like fear, attachment, anger, etc. And Nurture is most influential in animals that have emotions and a heavy duty ability to think, aka humans. A bee doesn’t need to learn anything, it instinctively knows what to do. A lioness cub has to be shown how to hunt, has to learn via watching a care taker. A person has a much more complicated life than a lioness, a complicated society, so a child learns a whole lot from caretakers, needs to learn to function effectively. Hence Nurture is very powerful.

anita